Good Coffee for Everyone: Inside La Barba, Salt Lake City's Award-Winning Specialty Roaster

There's a moment — you've probably had it — where a single sip of coffee stops you cold. Not because it's expensive. Not because someone's standing over your shoulder explaining the terroir. But because it just tastes the way coffee is supposed to taste, and you realize you've been settling for less your whole life.

That moment is exactly what Josh Rosenthal set out to engineer when he left Texas behind, fell hard for the Wasatch Mountains, and decided in 2012 that Salt Lake City deserved something better in its cup. The result is La Barba Coffee — Utah's most decorated specialty coffee roaster, and since 2019, the state's best coffee according to Food & Wine magazine. Looking for the best specialty coffee in Salt Lake City? The award is already on the wall. But the story behind it is what makes La Barba worth knowing.

From a Bootstrapped Dream to Utah's Defining Roaster

Josh Rosenthal is a musician from Texas who fell in love with Utah's Wasatch Mountain range while on a snowboarding vacation — and six months later, called himself a Salt Lake City resident. He invested himself in this city the way converts always do: harder than the locals. He didn't just want to open a coffee shop. He wanted to drag Utah's coffee scene into a conversation with the best cities in the world.

He did it by finding Levi Rogers. Since 2010, Rogers — a Portland, Oregon transplant — had been on a quest to set his coffee apart with the goal of roasting the "absolute best coffee." Together with Josh and his wife Becky Rosenthal, they built something genuinely new for Utah.

La Barba started as a specialty coffee wholesaler in November of 2014 going by the name Charming Beard, and after a couple of years of success in the wholesale world, opened a couple of shops on campus at the University of Utah. The rebrand to La Barba — Spanish for "the beard" — came in 2015, developed in partnership with the design firm WeLikeSmall. The Spanish influence was deliberate: Utah was once part of Mexico and Spain, and the brand's identity reflected that history, uniting old Spanish aesthetics with a nod to Salt Lake City's own story. 

The team chose not to go too deep into the rabbit hole of coffee details, for the sake of keeping newcomers engaged. As Rosenthal put it, it's important for Salt Lake coffee drinkers to know that drinking good coffee is really easy to do — it doesn't require an advanced degree. That philosophy became the brand's north star: four words, "Good Coffee for Everyone," that turn out to be a lot harder to live up to than they sound.

Today, La Barba has aimed to be the best coffee in the great state of Utah since its start in 2012, and is now in almost 70 restaurants and markets in Utah, with three operations of their own. No local competitor comes close to that wholesale footprint.

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What Food & Wine Saw That Everyone Else Already Knew

In April 2019, Food & Wine released their "Best Coffee in Every State" list and put La Barba at the top for Utah. The citation said everything.

"Since 2012, Utah's best has been on a mission — multiple missions, actually — working not only to make great coffee accessible to everyone, without pretense," author David Landsel wrote, "but also to keep their sourcing sustainable, with the goal of producers earning a living wage for the beans that La Barba buys."

Food & Wine called it "Salt Lake's most precise, most modern, and very best little café, sourcing from some of the country's finest."

That last phrase — sourcing from some of the country's finest — is worth sitting with. Josh Rosenthal sells a mix of fair-trade, direct-trade, and Rainforest Alliance Certified coffees. This isn't a marketing checkbox. It's the operating principle that shapes every buying decision La Barba makes. The farmers in Colombia's Huila region, the cooperatives in Ethiopia, the producers in Guatemala — they're not anonymous suppliers. They're the reason the coffee is good. La Barba's supply chain ethics are more explicitly documented than any local competitor's, and it shows in the cup.

What to Order: The La Barba Coffee Menu Explained

La Barba's specialty coffee is selected and roasted to entice your senses with a rich array of aromas and a balance of sweetness, acidity, and body. The lineup is tight, deliberate, and built around the idea that every kind of coffee drinker deserves something excellent. Here's how to navigate it.

The House Blend is the anchor. Colombia and Mexico, roasted to taste like milk chocolate, toffee, and stone fruit. The House Blend is designed to taste the same bag after bag — like blended whiskey, a good coffee blend is optimized for balanced flavor and consistency. If you're new to specialty coffee and nervous it'll taste "weird," start here. You'll understand immediately why people come back.

Noche Oscura is the manifesto in roast form. Specialty coffee has tended to shun anything dark. With Noche Oscura, La Barba sought to roast high-quality green coffee for those who prefer a dark, bold cup — coming straight out of their conviction that good coffee is for everyone. It's the most pointed rebuttal to coffee snobbery on the menu, and it's outstanding.

Deviation Espresso is for the adventurous. Bright, fruit-forward, and deliberately non-traditional — designed to break from everything you expect espresso to be. Pull it as a straight shot or drop it into milk and watch the character completely transform. La Barba created Deviation specifically so their roasters could work with a wider, more experimental array of origins. It's the opposite of their classic Standard Espresso benchmark, and having both side by side is genuinely illuminating.

Single origins are where La Barba shows off. When available, the Colombia Diego Bermudez Letty Geisha delivers pineapple, peach, and caramel — one of the most sought-after coffee varieties in the world, and not something you'll find at most Utah cafés. The Ethiopia natural process offerings bring deep blueberry and a brightness that doesn't quit. Ask the barista what's on bar and order a pour-over. You won't regret it.

Coffee + Tacos: SLC's Most Unexpected Pairing

Nobody saw this coming. A specialty coffee roaster deciding that the perfect companion to a precise, ethically sourced espresso was — a breakfast taco.

La Barba Coffee + Tacos, located in the Maven area of Salt Lake City, beckons both locals and visitors with its inviting atmosphere, specializing in coffee, tacos, and breakfast offerings with made-to-order meals. Guests can enjoy watching the team prepare tortillas right in the kitchen, adding to the experience. 

The Maven District is experiencing a quiet food-and-culture moment in Salt Lake City, and La Barba's presence at 155 E 900 S is a big part of why people are talking about the neighborhood. There is, for the record, zero direct competition for this concept in Utah. That's not an accident. It's a move that says something about who La Barba is: a roaster that makes bold, slightly counterintuitive decisions and then executes them with enough conviction that everyone else wonders why they didn't think of it first.

La Barba's Place in Salt Lake City's Coffee Community

La Barba doesn't exist in isolation. Every time you step into La Barba, you know exactly what experience you'll get. That reliability is its own kind of community service in a city that's still figuring out what kind of food town it wants to be.

The Draper location at 13811 Sprague Ln extended that community south into Salt Lake County — giving the suburbs a genuine specialty coffee anchor where one was badly needed. Combined with nearly 70 wholesale accounts across the state, La Barba's footprint is quietly enormous. Their coffee is in restaurant kitchens and market shelves across the Wasatch Front, often without anyone noticing, which is exactly how they seem to want it.

Their Roaster's Choice Subscription brings rotating single-origin coffees — freshly roasted, seasonally sourced from Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and beyond — directly to home brewers who want to taste the world without leaving Utah. It's among the best local coffee gifts in the state, and one of the few Utah roasters offering a truly robust mail subscription.

Planning Your Visit to La Barba Coffee

La Barba Coffee + Tacos — Maven District 155 E 900 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84111 Monday–Friday: 7am–2pm | Saturday–Sunday: 8am–2pm

La Barba Coffee — Draper 13811 Sprague Ln, Draper, UT Monday–Friday: 7am–4pm | Saturday: 8am–4pm | Sunday: 8am–2pm

Go on a weekday morning if you can — that's when the bar is most dialed in and the beans are freshest off the roast. At the 9th South location, order a breakfast taco. At either location, ask what single origin is on bar. If you're a dark roast person who's been burned by specialty coffee before, Noche Oscura is your entry point. And if someone you love hasn't discovered La Barba yet, the coffee subscription is the best gift you can give them.

Online: labarbacoffee.com | Instagram: @labarbacoffee

Here's what Utah's food scene needs more of: people who came here not because it was an obvious move, but because they genuinely believed in what this place could become. Josh Rosenthal is one of those people. He arrived for the mountains, stayed for the city, and spent over a decade building something that national publications eventually had to acknowledge — the best specialty coffee in Salt Lake City wasn't happening in New York or Portland or Austin. It was happening in the 801.

La Barba has been on a mission since 2012 — making great coffee accessible to everyone, without pretense, while keeping their sourcing sustainable and ensuring producers earn a living wage. Good coffee for everyone isn't a tagline. It's a standard. And if you haven't held them to it yet, it's past time.